Under the heat dome

Lest you think that I just invented the term "heat dome," please rest assured that I am not that clever. It's something that's been coined and in use for awhile now, and I just happen to be experiencing it in person right now.

I feel like I talk about the weather too much on this blog, but to hell with it, it's been brutal. For the past two weeks, the temperature hasn't been under 95, and for a majority of that time the heat index (temperature plus humidity/etc) has made it feel like 110 degrees or more. For reference, the other night I went jogging at 7:45 p.m. and the heat index was still 113. Over the course of 4 miles (and <> 28 minutes), I lost almost 3 pounds. No kidding, I weighed myself before and after.

Needless to say, I've been doing my best to stay cool. This involves lots of light colors and lots of light fabrics. Here is a fairly typical example of my wardrobe lately:


On this particular day, it was a short-sleeved pink linen shirt from Lands' End (thrifted for $2) paired with some Ralph Lauren seersucker pants (also thrifted, for $4) and a great striped d-ring belt that I just snagged last week.


Down below, I wore a pair of Generic Surplus boat shoes, another fairly recent pickup that I got from Gilt Groupe. Normally I eschew even their "discount" prices and rarely find anything that even fits me, but in this case ($29 - $25 credit + $6 shipping = $10), I simply couldn't pass up the navy boats.

The heat shows no sign of stopping, so I'm going to keep on using it as an excuse to break out some light-hearted color combinations. If I'm sweating, I might as well have fun doing so.

Gilt without the guilt

I'm not quite sure on the time frame, but I think it was about six months or so ago that I saw mention of Gilt Groupe, an invite-only, "flash sale" (usually only a couple days or so, with lots of stuff selling out within hours or even minutes) site that mainly caters to higher-end brands and designers (there was some questions raised by Put This On about their pricing/advertising about a month ago). Being the thrifty fellow that I am, I didn't think it would be a site that I'd need to join, but eventually signed up just to see what was being peddled.

As it turned out, just about everything on the site is waaaay out of my price point, and much of it laughably so. Once in a great while, though, I noticed an item that was close to something that I'd purchase, and I decided to hang out and see if anything caught my eye.

And it did!

There are a couple more juicy pictures in this older post.

While certainly not high-end, there was a batch of different Simple Shoes, including this gray tweed pair that caught my eye. The purchase price was $26 + $7 for shipping, which is certainly more than I'd pay for shoes at a thrift store, but I'd been on a bit of a shoe drought and got weak in the knees for the tweed. What can I say?

Unless they start stocking their site with more items under 30 dollars, I doubt I'll be a regular buyer, but heck, it was fun to do it once.

(Oh, and if you're not a member of Gilt but would like to experience the still mostly insanely priced sale items for yourself, leave me a comment and I'll shoot you an invite. Whee!)